Arthur Schomburg Beyond the Harlem Renaissance: Identity and African Diaspora (Part I)
“To his people and to his generation he gave all his energy, his vision, and the strength of his spirit, and more than this no man can give.” (Opportunity Magazine #16. July 1938 in Sinnette 161).
SourceGreetings, dear Steemians
After a long hiatus in my academic publication on African American Literature and culture, I'd like to retake the subject with this biographical study on one important and, for most, obscure figure in the history of the PanAfrican movement..
Arthur Schomburg (1874-1938) is perhaps one of the most interesting, complex, and least recognized figures of the Harlem Renaissance (African-American cultural movement, aprox. 1919-1929). He is known as “the most distinguished Negro bibliophile of his day” (Porter 298) who collaborated “with elite black intellectuals such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, and Charles S Johnson and [served] as mentor to Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and other young writers of the Harlem Renaissance” (Hoffnung-Garskof 1). Only these credentials should be enough to place Schomburg in a more privileged place in African American literature; yet, his name usually appears very briefly, only in relation to the “canonical figures” of the New Negro movement.
One of the reasons why Schomburg is so neglected or undervalued is because he epitomizes all “the good, the bad, and the ugly” of the Harlem Renaissance. Not only did Schomburg’s ideas oppose “prevailing North American assumptions about … early-twenty-century racial politics” (Sanchez 243) and racial identity, but they also served as catalyst for the emergence of the internal conflicts among the main figures of the movement. In life, Schomburg was partly ignored, humiliated or treated as an outsider because of his foreignness and academic handicaps: he did not have a college degree and always struggled with his writing. According to Earl Lewis, Schomburg had what Alain Locke “generously called an impossible command of English” (787). By serving to the cause of African Americans, yet being marginalized, Schomburg revealed the profound contradictions within the movement, not only philosophically or aesthetically, but politically and racially.
Schomburg the Man
Born Arturo Alfonso Schomburg on January 24 1874, this mixed-blood Puerto Rican faced early on in his life the consequences of racial indeterminacy. Whether his mother was a free slave from St. Thomas or St. Croix or whether his father was German-born or Puerto Rican with German heritage is not one hundred percent clear. In any case, after his political participation in the Cuban and Puerto Rican revolution and his involvement with the African American cause, Schomburg ended up negotiating “a dizzying array of ethnic and national identities—West Indian, Spanish, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Antillano, North American, African, Negro, and even German—never fitting exactly into any of them” (Hoffnung-Garskof 2).
How much formal education he acquired has not been well documented either, but it is a fact that in 1906, fifteen years after his arrival to the USA, “his attempts to receive a law certificate were thwarted when he could not produce evidence of sufficient schooling and the state refused to let him take the exam” (15). This act of intellectual snobbery did not prevent Schomburg from satisfying his personal aspirations and entering the world of the middle class black social clubs (idem). He relied on his “photographic memory” and sagacity to compensate for formal schooling. According to Elinor Sinnette, one of his biographers, Schomburg became a “self-taught historian, bibliophile, and collector...motivated by a need to combat racial prejudice. To a society that not only denied his humanity because he was black but also seemed skeptical about his ability to achieve, Arthur Schomburg responded by seeking out the evidence to prove his own worth and that of the people with whom he chose to identify” (41).
Schomburg’s inspiration to become, as J.A. Rogers called him, “the Sherlock Holmes of negro history,” is said to have come from his fifth-grade teacher who told him that "Black people have no history, no heroes, no great moments." “Because of this and his participation in a history club, Schomburg developed a thirst for knowledge about people of African descent and began his lifelong quest studying the history and collecting the books and artifacts that made up the core of his unique and extensive library” (Harlem Timeline). There is also a related incident when young Schomburg participated in a study group in San Juan. He recounted in an interview that “although all the members of the club, white and black were socially equal, nonetheless among the white and near-white members there was a tendency to speak with greater pride of the historical facts of their white forbears, than that of which the black members could show when speaking of theirs” (in Ortiz 23).
Apparently, this situation moved young Schomburg to research the origin of Puerto Ricans of African descent and to contest his fellow club members with achievements of their African ancestors. His friends’ skepticism made Schomburg go even further to incorporate research on peoples from Haiti, Cuba, and the Virgin Islands (idem). This adventurous spirit could have been awakened by his literary choices and social heroes. According to Ortiz, Schomburg was inspired by the literature of Defoe and Dumas and the heroic deeds of Haitian liberator Toussant L’Ouverture and Puerto Rican patriot and teacher Rafael Cordero (idem).
Schomburg’s life was to have a dramatic change due to his early contact with revolutionary leaders, such as Ramon Emeterio Betances. Betances had some influence on Schomburg and, after becoming an exile, he must have encouraged Schomburg to follow his steps and avoid Spanish repression (25).
SourceSchomburg arrived to the United States around 1891 and “found safe quarter and employment in New York City’s multi-hued Puerto Rican and Cuban communities” (Lewis 787). Most of the workers and artisans with whom Schomburg lived in those early years “were members of political groups and clubs dedicated to Caribbean independence” (Ortiz 25). The motives that made him leave his country were partly political, partly racial, but above all there must have been a sentiment of non-belongingness caused by the considerable social and political inequalities reining in the island as a result of its colonial condition and racial differences.
It is possible that Schomburg’s initial desire to collect books about African culture was politically motivated but, after the rupture with the groups of which he became secretary in 1892, Schomburg must have decided to give a less radical use to his insipient collection. The rupture and disappointment was partly caused by disagreement within the Puerto Rican political community regarding the future of the nation after US intervention in 1898. “‘Something happened... and Schomburg shifted his interest away from Puerto Rican liberation movement and went all the way, put all his energy into the [black] movement’” said Jesus Colón, a Puerto Rican independence fighter, about Schomburg’s departure from the group, (in Ortiz 35).
to be continued...
Thanks for your visit
Works Cited or Consulted
Hoffnung-Garskof, Jesse. “The Migration of Arturo Schomburg: On Being Antillano, Negro, and Puerto Rican in New York 1891-1938.” Journal of American Ethnicity History 21 (2001): 3-49.
Lewis, Earl. “To Turn as on a Pivot: Writing African Americans into a History of Overlapping Diasporas.” The American Historical Review 100 (1995): 765-87.
Ortiz, Victoria. The Legacy of Arthur A. Schomburg. A Celebration of the Past, a Vision of the Future. The Schomburg Collection Endowment Fund. The New York Public Library, 1986.
Sinnette, Elinor Des Verney. Arthur Alonso Schomburg, Black Bibliophile & Collector. A Biography. Detroit: Wayne, 1989.
“Harlem timeline.” CHICO. School of Information, University of Michigan
http://www.si.umich.edu/CHICO/Harlem/timex/timeline.html November, 2003
